Defoliation

Life is like a defoliation drifting with the wind. When the wind blew to the United States, it took me here. I have lived in the United States for three years with my parents. I am an immigrant. As an immigrant offspring ,I have felt intense pressure to do everything. There have been too many challenges for me to overcome. Parents cannot help you do anything cause they are deaf in the U.S.. Everything needs to be done on my own. My perception as a young man was that it’s a really a bitter way to walk through. So it always made me miss to the past and feel confused in my new environment.

Communication has been the biggest problem for me to overcome. It has been not only simply with English, but also Chinese. Many people from different province of China are living in the United States, and they all have different accents. I speak Chinese with a northeast accent. Most Chinese people in Chicago’s Chinatown come from the south part of China. Sometimes talking to them is much harder than talking to Americans. Three years have past and my accent has changed. I used to work in a restaurant in Chinatown and most customers were Chinese people. One day, a Chinese customer came, then I went to his table and had a small conversation. He asked me what part of Beijing you come from. I was laughing and answered I come from Shenyang. This year, I came to this class, there was a girl next to me named Tracy who asked me that “ Are you from Beijing?” I felt that I have lost my nature accent in this new land.

Happiness was a term to describe me when I was with my friends in China. No matter what we had done, I always had a smile on my face. But I can count my friends in the United States with one hand. As we all need to work and go to school, we do not get together too much. I just sit in front of my computer every day. I have no mood to play games. It is not like before, when I used to sit in the internet café with my friends to play games against other people. Counter Strike and War Craft are I games that I played a thousand times with my friends. But I had never felt bored; I felt happy. Now I play alone on the Internet. I do not even want to open the game. Sometimes I feel that they are leaves on the tree and I am a leaf dropping from the tree and the wind has blown me away.

Finally, when Chinese festivals came, I miss home very much. There are too many different festivals between China and the U.S.. When the Chinese festivals come, there is no atmosphere here even during the Spring Festival. In China, Spring Festival is the most fundamental festival. Fireworks fill the sky and relatives come together to celebrate it. But this year I was sitting alone and eating noodles. I missed my relatives and my home. The American festivals I did not celebrate with anyone. Charismas day is the biggest holiday in the U.S., but for me it was as same as normal day.

There is no stop for defoliation. When the wind blows mercilessly, it just goes with the wind. There is no way to the past, and the past becomes eternal memory. Keep forward is the path way to the success. I am who I am now. I am neither a kid nor who I was. No time for confuse and I just stay still. I just keep going forward and find the light from the darkness. But I still hope there will be a wind coming from east to blow me back.